Modes of Participation

This paper focuses on the notion of ‘participation’ as it has been used in the social sciences throughout the twentieth century. It proposes that there are two main traditions of use—a ‘poorer’ and a ‘richer’ one—and it argues in favour of the second. It does this by examining how Simmel and Goffman, on the one hand, and Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim, on the other, defined participation. Developed by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in the first part of last century, ‘participation’ in the richer sense is today being given new live by sociocultural anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins and phenomenologically inclined cognitive scientists such as Shaun Gallagher. The paper addresses the roots of the concept in Scholastic theology and proposes to show how central it can come to be to a sociocultural anthropology that is willing to take on frontally the challenges presently being posed by embodied cognition.